The Hockey Captain Wants the Size 20 Team Chef Every Night novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Five A.M.
On her first morning as the Blizzard's chef, Corinna catches the team captain stealing from her pot, and he looks at her like he has found his breakfast; then the PR chief hands her a rule sheet: never in frame with the players.
The first thing I saw on my first morning was a man's back, and it filled the whole walk-in doorway.
It was ten to five in the morning.
I was twenty-seven years old, five foot seven, a size 20, and carrying a forty-pound sack of onions on one hip.
The man was bent over my stockpot with a spoon in his fist.
He was wearing nothing but gray shorts, and he was dripping.
"That's the beef stew for lunch," I said. "Put the spoon down."
He turned around slowly, with the spoon still in his mouth.
He was six foot six, with dark auburn hair stuck wet to his neck, a broken nose, and a scar cutting through one eyebrow.
His right arm was inked from shoulder to wrist with a map of a lake.
His chest was one wide slab of muscle, and ice water ran down it in lines.
I had seen the captain of the Buffalo Blizzard on a billboard over the highway.
The billboard hadn't done it justice.
"You're the new chef," he said.
"I'm the new chef who just told you to put the spoon down."
He took the spoon out of his mouth and looked at it.
Then he looked at me, from my hair knot to my work clogs, and he took his time.
He didn't skim me and look away.
He looked at my hips in the black chef pants, and at my chest under the apron, and at my forearms.
He looked like a man reading a menu he'd already decided to order from the top.
My face went hot.
"Doran Beaulieu," he said.
"I just came out of the cold tub, and your kitchen smells like the best thing in this building."
"Corinna Prendergast. It's not for you. It's for forty guys at noon."
"Forty-one," he said. "Count me twice."
"Counting you once is generous."
His mouth tipped up on one side.
"Hank said he hired a woman from a diner in Erie who made him cry into a bowl of stew," he said.
"Coach Doyle cried about a bowl of stew?"
"He told me he was fine and that there was onion in the air."
I laughed before I could help it.
The sound seemed to land on him somewhere, because his eyes dropped to my mouth and stayed there.
I set the onions on the prep table.
I tried to ladle his spoonful back into the pot, and the ladle shook a little in my hand.
A drop of the broth ran over the rim and down my left wrist, across the old burn scar.
I didn't get to the towel.
He was across the kitchen in two steps, and he took my wrist in his hand.
His hand was enormous.
It wrapped all the way around my wrist and my forearm and still had room.
He lifted my arm and ran his thumb up the scar, slow, through the broth, and then he put his thumb in his mouth.
"God," he said, low.
My whole body did something I hadn't given it permission to do.
"You can't just," I said.
"I can't help it," he said. "I'm sorry. I'm not sorry."
He was still holding my wrist, and his thumb was still on my pulse.
"Everybody on this team ate like they were being punished," he said.
"Chicken breast, rice, one joyless piece of broccoli."
"Then Hank brought you in, and the hallway started smelling like somebody's grandmother's house."
"Good. That's the plan."
"The plan was you," he said.
"I'm here to cook."
"I know. I'm here to eat."
His eyes came back up to mine, steady and bright green.
"I'd like to eat everything you make, Corinna Prendergast, every day, for as long as you'll let me."
My heart was going so hard I thought he could feel it through my wrist.
He could.
I watched him feel it.
"Your pulse is fast," he said.
"It's four fifty in the morning and a stranger is holding my arm."
"I'm the captain. Nobody's a stranger to the captain."
"Is that a rule?"
"It is now."
I took my wrist back, and it was the hardest thing I'd done all week.
"Out of my kitchen," I said. "Eggs in twenty minutes."
"Yes, Chef."
He said it like a promise.
He walked out backward, the whole wide width of him filling the door, watching me until the last second.
I stood there with my hand against my own chest.
I turned back to the stove and found somebody standing at my elbow.
She had come in without a sound.
She was a tall woman in a black blazer, with a silver-blonde bob cut sharp as a ruler.
She held a tablet against her ribs.
"Ms. Prendergast," she said. "Delphine Hartley, VP of Communications."
"Hi," I said. "Nice to meet you. Eggs in twenty."
"I'll be quick." She smiled with her teeth and nothing else. "I saw the camera feed from the hall."
My stomach dropped.
"The captain is a very popular man," she said. "The brand is a very careful brand."
She held out a single sheet of paper, and I took it.
It had a title in bold at the top, and one line underneath.
RULE ONE: The chef does not appear in any photograph with the players.
"You're a lovely cook," Delphine Hartley said. "I'm sure you understand what we're building here."
I looked down at the rule, and then at her flat, pleasant face.
I understood it perfectly.
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